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Kendrick Lamar breaks sound barrier with Pulitzer Prize for music

Hip-hop artist’s win is first time award has not gone to a classical or jazz musician

Mon, Apr 16, 2018, 23:35Updated: Tue, Apr 17, 2018, 09:15

Kendrick Lamar: won the Pulitzer for his 2017 album DAMN. Photograph: Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images

In late January, the Compton, California, rapper Kendrick Lamar lost the Grammy Award for album of the year to Bruno Mars. DAMN., Lamar’s fourth LP, was his third straight to be nominated but ultimately fall short of the trophy, considered by most to be the top prize in popular music.

But perhaps not anymore.

On Monday, Lamar’s DAMN. took home an even more elusive honor, one that may never have even seemed within reach: the Pulitzer Prize for music. Lamar is not only the first rapper to win the award since the Pulitzers expanded to music in 1943, but he is also the first winner who is not a classical or jazz musician.

“The time was right,” Dana Canedy, the administrator of the prizes, said in an interview after the winners were announced. “We are very proud of this selection. It means that the jury and the board judging system worked as it’s supposed to — the best work was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.”

She added: “It shines a light on hip-hop in a completely different way. This is a big moment for hip-hop music and a big moment for the Pulitzers.”

Lamar was not immediately available to comment on his win. But Terrence Henderson, the record executive known as Punch from Lamar’s label, Top Dawg Entertainment, acknowledged the achievement on Twitter, writing that from now on, no one should “speak with anything less than respect in your mouth for Kendrick Lamar.”

Canedy said the board’s decision to award Lamar, 30, was unanimous. The board called the album “a virtuosic song collection unified by its vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism that offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African-American life.”

DAMN., which featured Rihanna and U2, along with kinetic production from Sounwave and Mike WiLL Made-It, among others, topped the charts and was among last year’s most-streamed albums, while also tackling thorny issues both personal and political, including race, faith and the burdens of commercial success. Though his work is often serious — and searing — Lamar, a dense and bruising lyricist, has managed to become a pop-cultural juggernaut as well, performing during halftime of this year’s college football national championship and overseeing the soundtrack for Black Panther.

The finalists, selected by a five-person jury and presented to the board for a winner selection, also included composer Michael Gilbertson’s Quartet and singer and composer Ted Hearne’s Sound From the Bench.

David Hajdu, one of the music jurors this year and a critic for The Nation, said that the group considered more than 100 compositions, including “some pieces of classical music that drew upon hip-hop as a resource,” leading to a philosophical discussion among the jurors about what could be considered.

“That led us to put on the table the fact that this sphere of work” — rap music — “has value on its own terms and not just as a resource for use in a field that is more broadly recognized by the institutional establishment as serious or legitimate,” he said.

When someone mentioned Lamar’s DAMN., there was “quite a lot of enthusiasm for it,” Hajdu said, though some members of the jury were less familiar with hip-hop than others. (The jury also included violinist Regina Carter; Paul Cremo of the Met Opera commissioning program; Farah Jasmine Griffin, a Columbia professor of English and African-American studies; and composer David Lang.)

“But we listened to it and there was zero dissent,” Hajdu said. “A lively and constructive conversation, but no dissent.”

The news of the prize sent a jolt through the classical music world, where living composers often struggle to be heard — competing not only against those who work in more popular genres, but also the long-dead greats who make up the classical canon. Some pooh-poohed Lamar’s win — one classical composer called it “insulting” on his Facebook page — but many others embraced it.

Hearne praised the decision to award the Pulitzer to Lamar, calling him “one of the greatest living American composers, for sure.”

“The work that’s on that album is every bit as sophisticated and experimental as any music,” he said in a telephone interview. “The idea that that’s not classical music, or that’s not experimental music, or that’s not art music is completely unfounded.”

It was not until 1997 that the Pulitzer Prize for music went even to a jazz work: Wynton Marsalis’s oratorio Blood on the Fields. In 1965, the Pulitzer jurors recommended awarding a special citation to Duke Ellington, but were rejected.